Personally, I enjoyed watching the women’s division stuff. Anything which helps to make our scene more diverse and less insular is a good thing. Regarding the role of women in the fighting game scene today, and the hostility I keep seeing towards not only a women’s division but frequently towards women in general around these parts, ask yourself: what are YOU doing to contribute to the existing skill disparity with your attitude?
Is it natural that women, compared to men, aren’t on the average capable of being as good at SF? Perhaps that is true, perhaps not. Personally, I suspect it isn’t true. But we won’t ever know unless we all do our part to foster an environment that’s as inclusive as possible. One nice thing about the competitive fighting game scene is an incredible amount of ethnic diversity amongst the people who play at the highest levels…but let’s suppose that the FG community had instead come of age during say, an era of Jim Crow segregation, or apartheid.
We would most likely hear the same sorts of arguments we currently hear about women’s skill potential directed towards nonwhites. And in fact, historically speaking, we DID hear those very same arguments, in every domain in life - sport, politics, the workplace, you name it. Frequently, the legacy of that kind of discrimination still shows its ugly head, having very real effects on peoples’ lives, even if the discrimination isn’t institutionalized into law the way it used to be.
Now institutionalized racism as we know it, is at most several hundred years old - racism didn’t create slavery, but rather the growing need for slavery just to sustain the early stages of capitalist development, what Karl Marx once called the phase of “primitive accumulation of capital” created an ideological justification, in the form of racism, for the practices of the triangular Atlantic slave trade, the virtual slave labour conditions endured by Chinese railway workers, and the like.
Now let’s look at institutionalized sexism, which is THOUSANDS of years old - and so deeply entrenched in our society and our way of thinking so as to often seem like the natural way of the world (although in truth it started to spread only with the development of agriculture and class society) and to not understand that even though great strides have been made towards gender equality in the past century or so, that those of us who are concerned about such things are still fighting in our daily lives to overcome the legacy of literally thousands of years of cultural garbage.
In a world where even in the most supposedly progressive countries, just to give one example, women earn at most maybe 70 cents to every dollar a man does, to suggest that we can make some kind of definitive judgment of the skill of women fighting game players based on their current level of participation in what’s sadly a highly sexist domain is absurd.
In fact, I’m reminded a bit of John Milton, when he wrote:
“They who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness”
Major credit to EVO for helping to change that, and major credit to every single one of the women who participated (some of whom did show quite a bit of skill) and to the men who did the right thing and did their best to create a welcoming environment.
